The body set up to monitor advertising in Britain on Wednesday said it had rejected complaints about billboards showing a woman’s breasts and sporting the slogan ”Discover Weapons of Mass Distraction” in order to advertise a cheap airline.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had received a total of 186 complaints from people who either found the ad degrading to women or considered that it trivialised the recent war in Iraq.
ASA said it judged the ad, placed by the low-cost airline EasyJet and aimed at attracting passengers to hot-weather tourist destinations, to have been ”light-hearted and humorous”, and ”unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence”.
Although the comparison of a woman’s breasts to the ”weapons of mass destruction” which the United States and Britain failed to discover in Iraq was ”distasteful”, it did not demean the troops who served in the Iraq war, the authority found.
The airline itself dismissed accusations of sexism in its ad, saying that it had just been ”topical, humorous and irreverent”.
The ad, which appeared on both billboards and in newspapers, showed a woman’s breasts in a bikini top, and also had the slogan: ”Lowest fares to the sun.” – Sapa-AFP